Wednesday 25 November 2009

In this episode

We begin this week's show in the English county of Wiltshire at one of the most famous historical sites in the world, Stonehenge. Speculation on the reason this ancient circle of monolithic stones was built range from human sacrifice to astronomy. Now after decades of debate about cost and conservation, the area surrounding Stonehenge is about to be rethought and it's to get a new visitors centre. And the job of designing on this enormously sensitive heritage site went, not to British or European architects but to the Melbourne firm Denton Corker Marshall.

Imagine a job designing a town on the side of a mountain, where you could literally live in the clouds among spectacular surroundings. The mountain is in Papua New Guinea and the town is Paiam. It was created in the 90s to service the Porgera Gold Mine, owned then by Placerdome, a Canadian based company. But it was a project with a difference. The company had a commitment to make the town a liveable place with alternative industries and a vision of sustainability. So they consulted the yellow pages to find designers, and they found Andrew Prowse, a landscape architect from JNP Pawsey and Prowse in Cairns.

This week in our trends spot, we're exploring cultural planning -- something that began in Australia in the early 90s at about the same time community based arts programs were thriving across the country. Cultural planning became part of what local governments do to enhance community life. How a busstop might be designed and used or how the environment takes into account our need to socialise with each other is planning for culture. If you think of the cafes which revitalised Melbourne's lanes and how they've become exciting spaces for meeting and conversation, you've got cultural planning. But it's a lot more than that and that's where it can get hard to define.

Convention centres: every major city has one. They're designed to accommodate huge crowds; delegates who descend on them from all corners of the earth for a few days of conference then go home leaving these vast buildings empty. For the people who inhabit the city, convention centres or exhibition centres must seem ghost-like structures. Enormous structures that rival sports arenas in size, they seem to sleep quietly between conferences or trade fairs. Well today we've decided to put conference and exhibition centres under the spotlight -- as a new book has just done.